So, Is Trump Trolling Canada?

President Trump: Canada can keep their national anthem when they become the 51st state pic.twitter.com/85aVHsRQ9v

— Rantingly (@rantinglydotcom) March 13, 2025

I tend to stay away from Victor Davis Hanson; I find his views just a little too pre-digested and several days behind what's actually going on, but the YouTube post below gives me a basis on which to make a different point:

At 4:29. he says,

We don't want Canada as a 51st state, and Trump knows that, and The Art of the Deal, trolling style, he knows that. Canada is a very left-wing country, socialized medicine, state-run industries. Its GDP is not as great as similar-size California, which also has 40 million people, but its per capita income average is about like Mississippi. I don't think it's as large as Mississippi's per capita income. But more importantly, if it was a state, if the whole country was a state, it would get two left-wing Senators and probably 50 left-wing House of Representatives.

But the headline of the same post is "THERE IS NO QUESTION CANADA IS DONE". Is this hyperbole? Do we really want a failed state on our northern border? Prof Hanson does offer a solution, assuming Canada is in fact a basket case, which is basically to rebuild its shipbuilding industry and reduce its tariffs on US goods. But will that really turn the country around? I haven't had the chance to ask him directly, but my experience of professors is that he won't have a good answer if I do.

Let's start with the professor's reading of Trump. His view of whether Trump actually wants Canada is a definite no. But the business-school analysis of Trump's style that I've been quoting for much of the past week points out that Trump relies heavily on ambiguity and uncertainty, delivered with bravado. Yesterday I linked a Politico piece that suggested the White House's position on the continuing resolution smacked of "over-confidence bordering on arrogance", but so far, it looks as though the White House's take has been absolutely spot on.

And let's recognize that in the week or so leading up to tonight's CR deadline, it looks as though the Democrats worked from the assumption that Johnson wouldn't be able to get enough Republicans in line to form a majority for the CR, the whole project would die in the House, and Schumer wouldn't have the dilemma he now faces. In this case, Trump's bravado helped to set up a situation where his opposition didn't take him seriously enough to work out a Plan B, and all of a sudden Trump's success came as a big surprise.

So I think it's dangerous to discount statements on how Canada can keep its national anthem when it becomes a state as just trolling. They're a recognized, and in fact highly successful, part of Trump's negotiating style.

But let's move to Prof Hanson's list of the specific disadvantages to Trump and the US if Canada should become a single state. It's a very liberal, even heavily socialized, country, and it would bring in two left-wing senators and maybe 50 left-wing House members. Canadians would be expecting their single-payer health plan to continue, and likely many other programs that would be unique to Canada, highly expensive, and a sudden new burden to the US federal budget.

On top of that, with only a few exceptions, the states that have entered the US after the 13 colonies have come in as basically unorganized frontier areas without pre-existing constitutions or legal systems, and their populations effectively grew de novo. The biggest exception up to now is Hawaii, which, however, became a US territory in 1900 as a result of US and European businessmen overthrowing the monarchy with the intent of fostering a US-style business environment -- and Hawaii only became a state after 60 years of US territorial administration.

It's worth noting that two US territories, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, became part of the US, but not states, at the same time as Hawaii and had existing constitutional and legal systems under Spain. The Philippines elected to become entirely independent, while Puerto Rico so far has not chosen to become a state. Again, the circumstances for Canada would have to be completely different.

How Canada would become a state would be via some procedure, and under specific circumstances, that nobody can easily predict right now, but would be completely unique. It would certainly be an obstacle that a certain amount of anti-Americanism has been part of the Canadian character, and as Prof Hanson suggests, Liberal politicians are using Trump's current bravado, taken as trolling, to inflame such passions in the runup to the coming election.

But if Trump is Trump -- or, if the necessary circumstances arise after he leaves office, but his successors continue with a Trumpian strategy -- the circumstances that would lead to Canada's admission to the Union would be those under which Canada would have few or no other options, just like the circumstances facing Sen Schumer over the CR. Such circumstances might involve collapse of the Canadian economy over tariff-related issues, which Prime Minister Trudeau has recently predicted.

They might involve a territorial incursion over some Arctic-related dispute, giving Canada no option but to allow the US military full rein to conduct its national defense under NATO Article 5. They might involve national bankruptcy over some issue other than tariffs, with the US electing to guarantee the Canadian national debt in return for statehood. In any such case, with a Trumpian conducting negotiations, Canada would simply have to have no other reasonable option.

But that would be the point -- it would be a situation where the US held the cards, and the US would be in a position to walk away if Canada didn't take the deal. On one hand, there are in fact plenty of conservative Canadians -- the various protests by truckers, religious people, and others during the COVID lockdowns give an indication of what an actual Canadian electorate working under US rules might look like. And if Canada had no other options, negotiations for entry into the Union could certainly include modifications or discontinuance of socialist policies and programs.

But then there's Hanson's other point -- why is Canada's per capita income little different from Mississippi's? Wouldn't policies oriented toward greater middle-class prosperity work to Canada's benefit? I wouldn't rule out the strength of this argument, either.

Given what we've been learning about Trump, I don't think he's trolling at all.